The erosive effects deepfakes could have on politics are also obvious — such as ‘Barack Obama’ calling Trump a “dipshit.” However, we haven’t yet seen any governing bodies or politicians’ reputations been destroyed yet by deepfakes. What we have seen is tons of womens’ likenesses put non-consensually in sexual or pornographic videos — whether they’re celebrities or not.

Being a victim of deepfake pornography

For 24-year-old Noelle Martin, her battle with deepfake pornography started six years ago. Anonymous predators stole non-sexual images of her from social media and posted them onto porn sites and threads. This was also accompanied by invasive and graphic commentary about her body.

The situation escalated even more, Martin told TNW: “It then moved to doctoring images of me into graphic pornography, on the cover of pornographic DVDs to fake images of me being ejaculated on.”

Some of the images of Martin were when she was just 17, raising the issue of child pornography.

Although it’s been six years since the first deepfake of Martin, she still faces continued harassment today. Martin says this is in response to her speaking out publicly about the initial deepfake: “It was when I started speaking out publicly about my story of image-based abuse that the perpetrators wanted to assert their dominance over me and try to silence me.”

In addition to making sexually exploitative content of Martin without her consent — or the porn performers’ — harassers have on several occasions shared her location and full name publicly to intimidate her.

Despite this, Martin has continued to speak out publicly against deepfakes, and even gave a Ted Talk to share her story as a victim:

These deepfakes are still easily found by searching Martin’s name, raising questions about her future employability and online reputation. Not being a celebrity, Martin doesn’t have the benefit of people knowing that these images _must_ be fake — as they would assume with famous actors.

Alongside Project Angora, Project Maru battled deepfakes by recognizing individual faces in GIFs and tagging them. As Motherboard reported, Maru can see that a fake porn GIF of Emma Watson looks similar to Emma Watson, but not identical.

The main problem with this technology is that it’s not accurate enough, and as deepfakes become more and more realistic, it could miss the fake porn GIFs.

But technology will never solve the problem on its own and there will always be need for coordinated government intervention in the form of clear laws.

Coordinated fight for the future

Since the internet is virtually borderless, perpetrators can be on the other side of the world ruining the life of a person they have never met, nor will ever meet.

“There needs to be stronger laws and penalties for this behavior and governments around the world, law enforcement, tech companies, websites, and social media sites need to work together if this is ever going to be dealt with effectively,” Martin explained.